


The Shared Dream

by TurtleTotem



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Cryogenics, M/M, technically character death but only because hundreds of years pass?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24490240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Charles's cryo-pod malfunctions and wakes him up a century before everyone else. Will he spend the rest of his life alone on a ship full of sleepers? (APassengersAU.)On Tumblrhere.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 69
Collections: Cherik Week 2020





	The Shared Dream

It took a long time for Erik to realize the dreams weren't his.

Well, that wasn't quite right; he was the one dreaming, right enough. But Charles's voice, Charles's presence, the comfort of blue eyes and the sensation of warm lips brushing his—those weren't coming from Erik's subconscious, telling itself half-coherent stories during the timeless drift of cryo-sleep. They were coming from Charles.

"I didn't know you'd be able to talk to me," Erik said, when he figured it out. The two of them were playing a chess game that kept rippling in and out of existence, in the unstable dreamscape. "I thought we weren't supposed to be conscious at all, not even enough to dream."

"We weren't," Charles said, and there was a twist to his mouth, a shadow to his eyes. "It takes a lot of effort to get through to anyone, actually. But I've got nothing but time."

Erik frowned, moved a rook that had been a bishop a moment ago. "What do you mean?" Horror began to dawn, manifesting as a rumble in the walls. "Charles, are you conscious?" Trapped in a body that couldn't move, couldn't wake, feeling the passage of the years that would take them to the faraway planet where they could finally build their mutant utopia—

"No," Charles said quickly, touching his hand. "No, thank God, that's the one thing that could be worse."

"Worse than…?"

Charles stood, banishing the chessboard, banishing the trembling walls. "I should go. Sleep, Erik. I shouldn't have troubled you."

"No!" Erik grabbed at Charles's wrist as it vanished, Charles's presence withdrawing from his mind.

"Shhh…" Charles's voice, directionless, tried to lay over him like a blanket, a comforting fog.

"Stop that," Erik snapped. "Stop trying to make me forget that you're _awake!"_

Erik would find out later how it happened—a piece of space debris crashing through just the wrong spot, damaging just the wrong part of the wrong system, to cut off power to one single cryo-pod. The failsafe system waking Charles early as the only way to save his life, leaving him alone on the vast empty automated ship, where no one else would wake until long after he died of old age.

Lesser men than Charles Xavier would have been tempted to wake someone else, anyone else, just to have some kind of companionship. There was a reason solitary confinement was outlawed on all civilized worlds. Charles had found some respite in his telepathy, using it to communicate with his sleeping comrades, in whatever limited and nonsensical way. Mostly with Erik, his husband and co-leader of the Krakoa Colony mission.

"Wake me up," Erik demanded again and again, shouting it to Charles's face, to his retreating back, to the dark skies of empty dreams. "Wake me up! I want to be there with you!"

"I can't do that. I can't doom you to life in a—a ghost town, in this echoing prison of empty halls and automated food dispensers, to live your whole life _here_ and never see Krakoa, never realize the dream we've sacrificed everything for!"

"Life at your side could never be a prison. And there are some things—one thing—more important to me than that dream."

Charles only shook his head. "Erik, the others are going to need you. We can't abandon them, they gave up everything to follow us. They won't have me to help them, but they'll still have you."

And when Erik continued to insist, Charles, his face in Erik's dreaming mind flickering between stoic determination and anguished sobbing, turned away for good. "I can't come see you anymore if it's going to be… like this. I love you, Erik. I'll miss you. I'll always miss you."

But when Charles was gone, Erik remained, clinging to a thread of consciousness, and straining to connect that thread to other threads. His powers. His magnetism.

The cryo-pods were mostly made of metal.

When the ship established orbit around the planet Krakoa, all the mutant colonists were awakened by the automated system, precisely as planned. All but two.

Jean, still groggy, was the first to step into the common area, though she was hardly alone. Scott and Kurt and Jubilee and a dozen others stumbled only a step or two behind her, with hundreds trailing behind them. She stopped, staring, the others bumping and staggering to a halt behind her.

When they went to sleep, a hundred and fifty years before, they had walked through this common area on the way to their cryo-pods. It had been clean and white and gleaming, cheerful in an antiseptic sort of way, looking like nothing so much as an empty mall. Now it was a garden, a jungle, greenery run wild in every direction, dirt and roots covering the white tiled floor.

"What," Jubilee said blankly.

"Professor?" Scott called. "Magneto? What's going on?"

"They're not here," Jean whispered, her conscious mind finally catching up with what her powers had been trying to tell her. She had expected Professor Xavier's mind to touch hers as soon as they woke. It hadn't. It wasn't here.

"What do you mean they're not here?" Scott demanded. "Where else could they be?"

Jean raised a hand and pointed. There was a shape, half-hidden by the overgrown plants. Scott and Kurt dashed forward and pulled down vines, broke branches.

A table, containing several books—handwritten, by the look of them, certainly hand-bound—and several letters, addressed in handwriting she knew very well. One had her name on it.

And beyond the table, a vault, made of gleaming metal. A tomb, the top of it carved with the forms of two men whose faces were much older than Jean remembered them, but recognizable nonetheless. They were holding hands.

 _We could not bear to be separated_ , read the inscription on the tomb. _May all of Krakoa be likewise united, always together at heart._


End file.
